Bilski v. Kappos
In Bilski v. Kappos, the U.S. Supreme Court declined "to impose limitations on the Patent Act that are inconsistent with the Act's text. The patent application here can be rejected under our precedents on the unpatentability of abstract ideas. The Court, therefore, need not define further what constitutes a patentable “process,” beyond pointing to the definition of that term provided in § 100(b) and looking to the guideposts in Benson, Flook, and Diehr."
Bilski had filed for a patent on a certain "method practiced by a commodity provider for managing ... the consumption risks associated with a commodity sold at a fixed price." The patent office rejected his claim, and he appealed - eventually to the United States Supreme Court.
The United States Supreme Court considered the question of whether non-material things such as software and business methods are patentable. There has been much opposition to software patents, and numerous programmers are hoping for the Supreme Court to use this case to invalidate them.
The Court emphasized that:
| “ | nothing in today's opinion should be read as endorsing interpretations of § 101 that the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has used in the past. See, e.g., State Street, 149 F.3d at, 1373; AT&T Corp., 172 F.3d at, 1357. It may be that the Court of Appeals thought it needed to make the machine-or-transformation test exclusive precisely because its case law had not adequately identified less extreme means of restricting business method patents, including (but not limited to) application of our opinions in Benson, Flook, and Diehr. In disapproving an exclusive machine-or-transformation test, we by no means foreclose the Federal Circuit's development of other limiting criteria that further the purposes of the Patent Act and are not inconsistent with its text. | ” |
Bilski v. Kappos, 561 U.S. 593, 612–13, 130 S. Ct. 3218, 3231 (2010).